Lover In The Shadows

The sound of something large moving outside on her open gallery.

Her heart banged against her ribs.

Her eyes snapped open. Heat flooded her, and her breath hazed the shiny metal in front of her.

Clutched in her hand, the knife had not changed.

She remembered going to bed earlier, with lights blazing around her. That much was clear. She recalled the quiet of the locked house around her, the dimly lit stairwell opposite her bedroom plunging straight into the belly of the house. She had lain facing that pitchy well, watching its shadows shift into shapes that hovered near her door as her eyes burned and twitched, and night deepened outside her window.

Oh, yes, she remembered staring into the darkness.

Sleep was a demon lover, furling his cape around her, tormenting and taunting, following close on her heels while, terrified, she ran for her life from his dark seduction.

Closing her eyes again, Molly rubbed her cheek against the floor. The tile against her face. Real. The knife in her hand.

That, too, real.

Like images curved and twisted in a fun-house mirror, everything familiar and ordinary was distorted now by the knife in her hand. From a far-off place, she felt the thing vibrating between her fingers like some terrifying dowsing rod that dragged her down to sunless caverns from which she’d never escape.

Wanting to disappear, to wake up in her bedroom with this moment only a disturbing nightmare half remembered in sunlight, Molly drew her knees to her chest, curling tighter into herself. As if they’d acquired a will of their own, though, her fingers gripped the knife even tighter.

Lying there, she grew gradually aware of other sounds—her raspy breathing, the drip of water from the sink faucet, the rain chattering against her shuttered windows.

And, close to her face, the knife rattling against the floor tiles.

That frenzied clatter finally broke her, sent her whimpering and scrabbling across the floor.

Eyes still shut against the monstrous vision in front of her, she edged back to the wall, the knife scraping the ceramic tiles with her movements.

When her hip bumped the corner of the room, she forced herself to open her eyes. With a courage she hadn’t known she had, she made herself observe the instrument of her terror.

Small flecks of drying blood spotted her thumb, but there in the burnished gleam of the knife blade, the reflection of an eye, large and wild, stared back at her. Shining in the dark, that eye watched her in silvery blankness.

An eye from a dark, mad place.

Hers, she realized with a gasp. Her face. Her eye.

Screams pushed at her clamped teeth and made her throat raw, but she held them inside. She clenched her jaw so tightly it hurt, knowing with a primal understanding that it was important not to scream.

Too close to a border she didn’t want to cross, she didn’t dare look back into that metallic eye. She sat up, her teeth clicking in a frantic, uncontrollable rhythm. She was shaking all over, the butcher knife still clutched in her fingers.

She couldn’t stop staring at the shining steel, the grain of the expensive wood in the handle, the splotches of blood on her hand and on the wood. As if staring at the minute details of the object would translate into understanding, she focused on the fine-grained wood.

There was no doubt about it. The knife was hers.

Just like the other times.

She’d used this knife more times than she wanted to recall. But no matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t remember coming down to the kitchen and picking it up tonight. Like those other mornings, she had no memory of opening the drawer with its carefully arranged knives and sharpening blade, no memories now to explain this spider web of blood on her palms, the clots of blood between knife handle and metal.

Shuddering, Molly fought to take a deep breath, but the thunder of her heartbeat, roaring and all-consuming, was sucking the air from the room. Dizzy in that pounding vacuum, she couldn’t find air.

Tugging desperately, her fingers scrabbling at the neck of her pajamas, she dropped the knife. The clatter as it fell onto the tiles released her. Huddled in the corner of the kitchen, she inhaled, loud, ugly gulps harsh in the solitude. Tears ran down her cheeks and she scrubbed them, her fists abrasive against her cold, wet lips and eyelids.

She had to think.

She had to make sense of this latest incident.

Was she crazy, after all?

Bracing her palms against the wall, she lifted herself into a standing position. Her knees buckled, but she gritted her teeth and clung in desperation to the solid surface. Against all reason, she was relieved, relieved that her hands left no smear of blood on her pale gray walls.

There had already been enough blood.

Molly groped along the wall, flicking on the light switch when she came to it. Lightheaded and drunk with fear, she placed her palms on the wall, carefully, one after the other. She ended her journey at the stainless-steel double sink, where she gripped the lifeline of its curved, satiny edge.

The edge of the knife’s blade was curved, too.

Sweat popped out at her hairline, ran down her spine, and she found herself dry-heaving into the spotless basin. When the wracking convulsions ended, she yanked the faucet handle up as far as it would go.

Cold water gushed out and she cupped it again and again, faster and faster against her face, her hands, her throat. Water sprayed, dripped everywhere, yet she couldn’t stop rubbing her hands under the spray, rubbing and rubbing but still seeing blood on her fingers. Great rasping sobs tore through her.

But she hadn’t given in to screaming. Comfort of a sort in that knowledge. She hadn’t surrendered to the madness dimly seen in her reflected eye.

Her pajama top was plastered against her breasts when she finally gained control. Bent over the sink, she gripped its edge while water slithered down her neck. Damp and cold, the wet, silky fabric of her top brushed her nipples, chilling them into hard bumps.

After the first incident, she no longer slept naked, no longer left her windows open to the night lurking at their edge, to the darkness threatening now at the edge of her mind. The idea of being vulnerable was unbearable.

Whatever it was, that thump she’d heard on the gallery had been real.

Pulling the black, silky cotton away from her breasts with fingers that still trembled, Molly looked around her once-loved kitchen. Cool and serene, it bore no trace now of the violence that had splashed its walls with blood.

The tongues of both bolts on the door to the outside gallery were snug in their grooves. She’d always been careful about locking up before she went to bed. In the last year she’d become obsessed with the need to check and recheck locks and bolts, even braving the dark stairwell to come downstairs in the middle of the night and check again.

She remembered roaming the house last night, examining the locks in her gritty-eyed exhaustion, but she’d gone back to bed afterward.

She hadn’t slept. Not during the night. Never then.

During those lost, lonely months after the murder of her parents, sleep had eluded her.

Wrapping her arms around herself, Molly glanced slowly around the room. She wouldn’t think now about the other rooms off the shadowy hall.

Like the door, the kitchen shutters seemed undisturbed, but she couldn’t tell if the windows behind the shutters were still locked until she made herself move away from the sink.

Everything was where it should be—the red enameled teapot on the black mirrored stove, the black-and-white place mats on the table.

One thing only stood out of place…the long-handled knife on the floor.

She couldn’t pick it up.